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I actually did dream about the native American once. It was very lucid and powerful. In this dream, I was concern about my path. So, I was led into this tent and I encountered several native American elders. Is one of these dreams you can not forget. Yet, do I dream about the early colonists in this country? NO. And why? Don't know. Maybe what we thought as the American spirit does not really exist at all.

No....I dream of historical figures all the time. What books?... I even heard Hebrew spoken to me in my dreams. Deities...like what? American deities? I dream of Sambhogakaya beings all the time. They are generally Abott Buddhist monks. Couple of Taoist masters. One even looked like me but he is not. I mastered the MCO just because I woke up from a dream about couple of Han dynasty warriors. What books??? What are you talking about??

You may say the Trump phenomena is also a part of the Tao because of the Yang rising...hehehehe... BUT...I dream of him twice. In the first dream, I was lecturing him on the finer point of Nazism because I realized that he was a closet Hitler. In the second dream, I saw him having a setback in his campaign because he has miscalculated. This analogy was played out in the game of baseball. I don't feel it. I don't feel America....the American spirit. For me, America isn't real.

Not just in dreams but in your own reality, there is no origin to say. You can not explain how you were born into this world at this specific time and place with a specific parents. Much like dreams. However, I do remember that in some dreams I would see myself sleeping, as in what I was actually doing in my real life. Sometimes, I see myself sleeping in my own room or in some place else. Once woke up, I became aware of the "situation." That is.....I was in a specific dream context with a specific contextual element with its own karmic force. I would become fully aware of this force. I would just play along and to allow things to unfold.

Struck me the other day how another aspect of life and reality emulates the dream states, based on something I think Karl said about the origin of the universe not having a set beginning, not being created, it just was... Reminded me a lot of how I interact with my dreams. Most often, there is not a clear recollection of the start of a dream, I become lucid as it plays out and I'm suddenly aware of things and my apparent place in them. Reality reflects dreams for me in this way. We have no clear, distinct recollection of the origin of reality. It just was and one moment, we found ourselves aware that we are interacting with it.

To be with the Tao, you are in Wu Wei. To live harmoniously at least. Yet, America is too divided. Just look at the Trump phenomena!!! Now, Pentagon with its own foreign policy agendas, is trying to drag the country into wars with China and Russia (military buildup in the South China Sea and Nato expansion in the East of Europe)..even when we don't even know who would get elected as the new president. America is not in and with the Tao because I don't sense it. I don't dream about America. I dream about people I know in America but I don't dream about the spirit of America...if it ever exists. I dream about Israel a dozen times, the spirit of Israel and Zionism. In the past, I dream about German history. Even the former, late foreign minister Guido Westerwelle. I feel that I am connected to him (dream of him more than a dozen of times). I have to admit it, I dream of John Kerry once but it wasn't about America. I have couple of dreams about Obama too but I was never in conversation with him. Is more like I was witnessing him.

Karl, I didn't even have hedonism in mind (that's low hanging fruit anyway)-- I mean the seeking "respectable" job, the "respectable" status, or in the US what they call the "American Dream." Seeking those things makes life an awful lot more complicated than necessary. You become less worried about things that in the end don't really matter one way or the other. Daoism and Epicureanism (the real Greco-Roman philosophy, not the caracature of it) have this much in common-- the more simple your life, the more enjoyable it becomes-- I can certainly say this has been my own experience. Once upon a time my ex-wife and I lived a very affluent lifestyle and we were good little consumers. The funny thing was, the more money you make, the more you spend-- so we moved to a bigger place, got a new car, had a more expensive overhead. We put money back too of course-- we didn't fritter it all away, but it only made our lives more hectic (we were living in Dallas at the time). In the end, we moved back home and lived a more modest life. It was a "sacrifice" well worth making because we had more time to enjoy the beauty that nature had to offer, and I had much more time to enjoy reading and writing (please do note the emphasis there...) There are things far more important than what any society has to sell. In fact it is an inner peace that can't be bought or sold. It's not about "sour grapes" nor about "giving up happiness" or enjoyment, but asking: "Will owning a big house crammed with things really make me happy?" Or is this more clutter to keep up with? This is, after all, one of the main points that the Dao De Jing makes repeatedly.

Those that keep The Sacred Lotus Flower Sutta within their Hearts, "the Mantra is the Mind" and "the Body is within the Fleeting World". Therefore in Emptiness there are no instructive meanings, is there in this: The Great Cart thumps in agitation. The mantra (Namu Myoho Renge Kyo) is the mind (of Buddha) the Body (ultimate reality as it is, 'Jisso', now) is within the fleeting world. The great cart thumps in agitation like the ferry thumps impatiently at its mooring before the journey. So, one must enter the room, dawn on the robe, have Buddha Compassion, sit on the Throne and be Without Self, sense ultimate reality as it is, all in this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. or So, one must enter the room, dawn on the robe, have Compassion without Choice, sit on the Throne and be Selfless, sense ultimate reality as it is, all in this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. Ignorance - Fear- Hate - Suffering When people are born, they are born without Choice. When they grow up and learn their Name, they remember they were born with no Name, born without Choice. You learn that if you do not Choose, others will choose for you and that choice maynot be the choice you would choose. “ The cause of all sorrow lies at the very beginning; it is hidden in the ignorance from which life grows. Remove ignorance and you will destroy the wrong desires that rise from ignorance; destroy these desires and you will wipe out the wrong perception that rises from them. Destroy wrong perception and there is an end of errors in individualized beings. Destroy the errors in individualized beings and the illusions of the six fields will disappear. Destroy illusions and the contact with things will cease to beget misconception. Destroy misconception and you do away with thirst. Destroy thirst and you will be free of all morbid cleaving. Remove the cleaving and you destroy the selfishness of selfhood. If the selfishness of selfhood is destroyed you will be above birth, old age, disease, and death, and you will escape all suffering.” "Through many births I sought in vain The Builder of this House of Pain. Now, Builder, You are plain to see, and from this House at last I'm free; I burst the rafters, roof and wall, and dwell in the Peace beyond them all." Is this the essence of Buddhism?

Those that keep The Sacred Lotus Flower Sutta within their Hearts, "the Mantra is the Mind" and "the Body is within the Fleeting World". Therefore in Emptiness there are no instructive meanings, is there in this: The Great Cart thumps in agitation. The mantra (Namu Myoho Renge Kyo) is the mind (of Buddha) the Body (ultimate reality as it is, 'Jisso', now) is within the fleeting world. The great cart thumps in agitation like the ferry thumps impatiently at its mooring before the journey. So, one must enter the room, dawn on the robe, have Buddha Compassion, sit on the Throne and be Without Self, sense ultimate reality as it is, all in this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. or So, one must enter the room, dawn on the robe, have Compassion without Choice, sit on the Throne and be Selfless, sense ultimate reality as it is, all in this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. Ignorance - Fear- Hate - Suffering When people are born, they are born without Choice. When they grow up and learn their Name, they remember they were born with no Name, born without Choice. You learn that if you do not Choose, others will choose for you and that choice may not be the choice you would choose. “ The cause of all sorrow lies at the very beginning; it is hidden in the ignorance from which life grows. Remove ignorance and you will destroy the wrong desires that rise from ignorance; destroy these desires and you will wipe out the wrong perception that rises from them. Destroy wrong perception and there is an end of errors in individualized beings. Destroy the errors in individualized beings and the illusions of the six fields will disappear. Destroy illusions and the contact with things will cease to beget misconception. Destroy misconception and you do away with thirst. Destroy thirst and you will be free of all morbid cleaving. Remove the cleaving and you destroy the selfishness of selfhood. If the selfishness of selfhood is destroyed you will be above birth, old age, disease, and death, and you will escape all suffering.” "Through many births I sought in vain The Builder of this House of Pain. Now, Builder, You are plain to see, and from this House at last I'm free; I burst the rafters, roof and wall, and dwell in the Peace beyond them all."

They experience reality directly, everybody does regardless of words. That should be obvious from childhood where there is no vocabulary. A baby must build concepts from perceptions. A mental fog is only conceptual. It is when you have a higher concept then realise you actually have no precise definition for the concept. In fact it is floating. It is that way because it is not grounded in reality. This was something I tried explaining in the 'dream/reality' thread. We can have all kinds of floating concepts and sometimes we attempt to evade actual definitions in case the reality crushes the dream, or because we generally have been unknowingly ignorant.

a certain amount of dreams are processing the daily junk, but they're far from being just a balancing tool. they literally are your psychological state, or what we would consider a direct representation of it. different layers of the same reality. if we expand 'psychological state' to encompass all our feelings at an energetic level, where they are arising from, that's more accurate. and even then, it's more part of an ongoing purification process. for example have a relatively peaceful day and your dream time has more chance to start dealing with the backlog, the deeper conditioning that's hindering us. what happens when you penetrate really deep through these layers is where it gets interesting - lucidity and various levels of light/pure awareness experiences. this higher awareness can be carried into the waking state with increased direct perception and noticing the basic ground. more advanced people can even be aware of everything that happens between the moment they fall asleep and wake up in the morning. that's a whole different spin on how we generally think of sleeping - ie a more unconscious, seperate part of reality.

One way to experience the dream like quality of the so called waking state, is to view with softer eyes, which are wide open, but relaxed with emphasis on closeness as opposed to distance.

Its possible I guess, but personally I don't recall any dream where the essential sense of the central character (me) has changed to someone completely different. Have you had dreams like that?

Infants dream, animals dream, and most of my dreams are very pleasant. I think our problems can express in dream as can our pleasures and successes. The activity of thought is not restricted by the sleep cycle. I do agree that many of us have so much repressed and suppressed stress and anxiety that it seems as if dreaming is mostly related to problems.

Not exactly...you are assuming that in the dream state, we dream of problems only. For most people. On the other hand, people who are advance on the path do astral travels during the dream state. Some even receive visitations from their spirit guides or some immortal beings and receiving instructions and teachings. The dream state is simply a reality which isn't bonded by the law of the psychical world or the rules of the society.

Here is a Western interpretation of Zhuangzi from philosopher John Gray….. Chuang-Tzu is as much a sceptic as a mystic. The sharp dichotomy between appearance and reality that is central in Buddhism is absent, and so is the attempt to transcend the illusions of everyday existence. Chuang-Tzu sees human life as a dream, but he does not seek to awaken from it. In a famous passage he writes of dreaming he was a butterfly, and not knowing on awakening whether he is a human being who has dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a human being. Unlike the Buddha, A.C. Graham explains, Chuang-Tzu did not seek to awaken from the dream. He dreamt of dreaming more lucidly: 'Buddhists awaken out of dreaming; ChuangTzu wakes up to dreaming.' Awakening to the truth that life is a dream need not mean turning away from it. It may mean embracing it: If 'Life is a dream' implies that no achievement is lasting, it also implies that life can be charged with the wonder of dreams, that we drift spontaneously through events that follow a logic different from that of everyday intelligence, that fears and regrets are as unreal as hopes and desires. Chuang-Tzu admits no idea of salvation. There is no self and no awakening from the dream of self: When we dream we do not know we are dreaming, and in the middle of a dream we interpret a dream within it; not until we wake do we know that we were dreaming. Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream. We cannot be rid of illusions. Illusion is our natural condition. Why not accept it?

"He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman - how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labelled the Supreme Swindle. Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed." (From The Complete Works Of Chuang Tzu, translated by Burton Watson.)

In a dream there is a central character (you) to whom all this stuff is happening to, then you wake up from the dream in the morning and you realise it was all a creation of your mind but there is still this central character to whom all this stuff is happening to it just now exists in your waking hours. But if you wake up from your life "spiritually" then the difference is that there isn't this central character any more, it is realised as just more imagination. So I would say generally our lives are like dreams, in the sense that we are living in illusory mind created ideas of what we think we are, but reality isn't like a dream because when we realise reality we are no longer doing that, the central character of the story has vanished.

Oh! Back to dreams. I have mentioned before that I rarely dream. That is, I am rarely aware of what my brain is doing while I sleep. I can't even remember the last time I had a "bad" dream. I still suggest that if we are conscious of our dreams it is because we have "real life" problems we have not yet resolved.

You mean...you have no feelings lingering on from some bad life experiences you had some years ago?? You don't dream about events happened to you when you were younger? You don't see the world though some mental prejudice you have because of what happened to you some years ago? Hard to believe.... If you say so..... Even an apple or an orange isn't permanent either. Let them sit outside under the sun and they would decay into some organic matter. How can you call them real when they don't even last permanently.

Yes, if you remove the qualifier of 'generally' that is correct. Now, one step further. The abstract things are directly related to concrete things. If they are not, then the philosophical abstraction is a floating concept tied to nothing at all and therefore cannot be succesfully integrated which makes it invalid. Throw away and begin again. Going back to the garden shed. If the abstract conceptual design is not tied to real world concretes it can't be built. Luckily we have logic to help us eliminate most of the error. The danger is carrying an abstract that does not relate to existent concretes and takes on a life of its own. Living the dream isn't dreaming the living. One is practical real world, the other is tortuous mental gymnastics designed to keep the abstract from touching reality.

@Karl, Yes good point about the two phase war. Someone once described (I don't know who though) British foreign policy as - avoid doing anything but when forced, act entirely in our own interests. And actually I wish we had stuck to that. But of course politicians like to meddle in world affairs - and usually come unstuck e.g. Blair. I once read a fascinating book about German history from Bismark to Hitler ( I seem to have lost it so don't know the title) and I think we have an extraordinary misunderstanding about who the Germans are, how they think and why they do what they do. This is probably why we mishandled the end of both wars strategically. In particular the relationship between Germany and the countries to the East is something I doubt we will ever relate to properly. There's always a sense of tremendous intellectual power mixed with insecurity which we as English particularly don't share. Generally speaking English people despise philosophy unless it is a form of empirical pragmatism and also while others dream of perfection - we think, in our hear of hearts that England is already the new Jerusalem and there is nothing more to do than be what we are. Our feet are firmly grounded in self belief and confident of our boundaries. A faith in our own rightness which makes us perfidious Albion to the French. I think this is also why being an EU member instinctively seems like an act of betrayal of our own value. In much the same way as, while being for a time part of the Roman Empire it is not instilled in our blood in the same way as in most of the rest of Europe. I was proudly told by two Portuguese professors once how they had been civilised as part of the Roman Empire for over 700 years and had inherited one of the purest Latin based language forms - to which my reaction was well poor you - you can see why English is such a powerful and adaptable language then being as it is such a bastard tongue. While the tendency to wish to remain pure makes the Romance languages strangely stale and self-preserving. English just eats up other languages as it goes with it's ever widening lexis - what Melvyn Bragg called it's treasure hoard of words. This is also the great mistake of the EU in thinking top down. To have an ideal vision and an ideology which builds its cities in the mind first and then in reality later - only to realise that in the real world they do not work. Instead they should have let the thing develop organically in response to changing environments and with enough adaptability to meet the needs of all its members. Rather like an unplanned city.

Dreams are balancing your psychological state. I don't think reality is like a dream.If you have to put it like this, you are saying as if orange is like a banana.

All good and important points Apech. I refer to it as one war cut in two. It never really ended and many statesman realised the peace would be over in less than quarter of a century. It was also an unnecessary war not led by the people, but a group of idiots who's idea of foreign policy lacked any finesse. Churchill in particular couldn't wait to have a war, he loved war and lived for it. I don't think we will be granted Liberty. We must claim it and fight for it. It is far better to break a larger enemy into smaller groups if we wish to achieve success. The problem with the EU is that it is in a desperate fight for the survival of an idea. The idea is patently wrong, but there is now so much inertia and vested interest in maintaining it, that not one thing can be allowed to be seen to fail. One of those things is for Britain to remain loyal to the idea. This is not a good idea. Not for us, not for Europe and not for the rest of the world. You only need to see what has been done to Greece in the name of the EU dream to understand the kind of scorched Earth politics that underpin the people who are forcing it forward. Sometimes people can't see when the body has died and they keep spending greater and greater resources on trying to re-animate it. The EU is a corpse already, we don't need to make the population who live under its flag corpses in order to pronounce the time of death. Think of Britain leaving as a kind form of euthanasia. A wake up call for everyone. After that, we will have to fight our own battles on British soil, but, at least we won't be shackled to a far greater tragedy.

Hi all, I am looking to get a bit of advice on a topic that has had my head spinning in circles for some time now! - What would the Taoist approach to overcoming bad habits? I have a number of habits that I consider to be 'bad', in the respect that they cause me some degree of internal conflict whenever I indulge in them. I have come to the conclusion that the main problem underlying all of these habits is my lack of willpower. I always find myself falling back into old routines. Here's an example- From the age of roughly 17 (I'm 28 now), I have smoked cannabis. When I was younger I used it heavily pretty much every day with friends. As I've grown older the usage has declined massively. I now only smoke at the weekends and don't generally touch it during the week. But recently I have started to feel as if I am just smoking for the sake of it, and that it sabotages my ability to get things done and just generally makes me lazy and eat too much etc.. I was discussing the issue with my partner to get her thoughts on it, and she feels the same way- that the enjoyment factor has started dropping away and we are just doing it because it's what we have done for so long in the past. So I came up with the idea of just smoking occasionally only when friends come and visit, say every 2-3 weeks, and that we wouldn't do it when we are alone. We have recently returned from a holiday in India, so haven't touched anything in 2 and a half weeks, but now that I'm home I can feel the pull of the bad habit creeping back in. I always seem to crumble and then just end up mad at myself for giving in. Another example is meditation practice- something which I do thoroughly enjoy, but never manage to stick to for more than 3-4 weeks. These habits just go around in continuous cycles. Is self improvement just some kind of mental trap? I'm not sure if I should just allow things to run their course and stop trying to improve/strive for these ideals that I dream up for myself. I look forward to hearing from you guys and getting your insight on this situation Kind regards.